Every day can be Sunday

Already in the nineties, some 80% of Palestinian kids showed signs of PTSD and nearly half had witnessed the death of a friend. This episode of Ordinary Unhappiness with Jess Ghannam has me still reeling in my dad-feelings:

Things got so profoundly worse in Gaza after the 2005 blockade … The children stopped playing. The trauma was so deep and so intense, and so unremitting, that their capacity and the ability to play was severely curtailed. That got me thinking about, well, how do we intervene? Am I going to bring a kid in and do play therapy? When there’s only one psychiatrist for 1.5 million Palestinians? Are we going to administer medications? You can’t just drop Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or Prozac on large communities who’ve experienced this structural violence for such a long time and expect the trauma to be mitigated or to get better. It’s much more complicated. We have to create spaces for children where they can come and be children, so that they can engage in play.

On why “Urban land, whose value accounts for about 80 percent of the geographic variation in residential property prices, is what makes housing fundamentally different from other sectors of the economy.”:

When a city “upzones” — that is, when it allows denser development by lifting the cap on the number and size of housing units that can be built on a given piece of land — the price of land actually goes up, which makes it more expensive, all else equal, to build housing there. Some may find this paradoxical: How can eliminating a restriction on the supply of something make it more expensive?

Really nice review of a brilliant novel that the author once joked was “university diversity initiatives IN SPACE!!!.” Samatar-hive, assemble:

This is a mature, subtle work, and it’s also fascinating how it seems to be distilling and engaging with YA tropes. The basic outline matches up: the dystopian world, the youthful challenger, the caste system. It’s particularly interesting how The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain deals with names. Only the upper class get proper names, our main characters remaining simply “the boy” and “the woman,” and the judicious use of capitalized words—“the Hold,” “the Practice”—reinforces the feeling of a simplified story.

But it is also a complex one, with layers of satire, humor, and a deep and thoughtful ethics. Science fiction readers will find fruitful parallels here with Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts, and, in its moral clarity, a resonance with Le Guin’s Four Ways to Forgiveness. The novella’s thematic concerns recommend it to anyone interested in prison abolition, workers’ rights, and perhaps even Christian socialism—with its nuanced and foundational consideration for the humanity of the suffering, its clear-eyed critique of the designed brutality of class structure, and its conception of salvation in community, this had me reaching for Richard Rorty’s “Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes,” on reading the New Testament alongside The Communist Manifesto.

The Guardian posted a weirdly abridged version of this great profile of César Aira, but you should read the full version at The Dial, because it presumes that you know and care who someone like Sergio Pitol is, and doesn’t assume—as I assume the Guardian did—that you, on opening a profile of a great Latin American writer (César Aira), would be turned off by the mention of a great Latin American writer (Sergio Pitol). The Guardian version opens by assuring you that Patty Smith likes Aira a lot. Anyway, you should fly forward with the full version at The Dial unless you can read Portuguese, in which case the original Brazilian article might be even more lavish and great:

For an Argentine, to say a great local writer seems like or is influenced by Borges must sound absurdly lazy. But both authors start their brief, densely packed books with literary anecdotes or memories written in crisp prose. In the works of both, there are frequent essayistic digressions. Both persistently turn to the literary technique of ekphrasis. There are metafictional and metaliterary games, references to other works.  

The main difference is perhaps in the intensity and direction of the narrative swerves, and Aira’s greater comfort with pop culture and genre literature. Whereas a story by Borges might take up a lost 19th-century Persian manuscript, a novel by Aira might locate it behind the balcony of a McDonald’s in Flores, pored over by an adolescent with an acne problem.

The punctum, for me, is the moment when Steven Salaita just kind of runs out of energy to be mad at Zadie Smith—in a post that is extremely mad at Zadie Smith—because as maddening as Smith’s rhetorical exercise is (from its inconsistent and uncritical absorption of elite class talking points to its lazy disinclination to read anything but the shadows cast by the discourse on the back of her brain to the “monster at the end of this essay” ending where her narcissistic martyrdom would make Ricky Gervais blush), there’s also just a nothing-ness to the essay that the more you try to criticize, the more shadow-boxing you feel like you are:

I could explain why the essay also fails rhetorically, stylistically, and creatively, or go on about how it is thoughtless, ungenerous, superficial, but what’s the point?  It was doomed the moment that Smith decided she could philosophize without politics.  It only got worse when she changed her mind and then found ten different ways to butcher the word “political.” 

I was bummed that I forgot to tell the cranky old boomer that I chatted with at the UC Berkeley encampment to read Jay Caspian Kang’s piece on the UC Berkeley encampment. I have some criticisms of the piece, which is to say, I have some analysis of what it tries to do and what it doesn’t do—which is to say I’ve found it an interesting example of the limitations of the genre because of how it pushes against those limitations (which is that despite being that most rare and precious thing, a work of thoughtful journalism based on going out and finding things out and then thinking about it, it does fall into some of the patterns that pieces of this sort often do, for better or for worse: 1. the structural necessity of balancing one Palestinian kid against one Jewish kid (and giving one of them significantly more column inches), 2. the structural necessity of balancing 1968 against today, skipping over intervening tented protest on Sproul plaza moments like divestment from apartheid and occupy (FSM was fucking almost 60 years ago, after all), and 3. the biographical focus on “what makes these kids do this?” which undermines any “why aren’t you also there, person with a conscience?” message one might otherwise take away)—but in the end, all that is pretty safely nested in the parenthetical where we overthink something that is, in the end, just a much better version of the sort of thing we usually get, and about a good as a New Yorker account of protesting kids these days could possibly be. The cranky old boomer in question seemed a pretty classic example of The White Berkeley Liberal, a man (in his 70s?) who was vaguely irritated at the encampment, but largely apolitical and mostly ignorant of its meaning, demands, and cause; he was just going to the library to read magazines, and I suspect I looked old enough, white enough, etc enough, that he enjoyed talking at me and also willing to hear me explain, as much as I could, what it was all about; he was interested to hear the history of tents on that spot, from FSM to anti-apartheid and occupy and he was impressed that the demand wasn’t withholding taxes—which was what he thought it was—but was about divesting the university endowment, and he was a lot less hostile to the students than his initial irritation and ignorance made me expect. I wish I had remembered to tell the guy to read Kang’s piece, because it would been just exactly what he needed to hear, framed in the way he needed to hear it: what exactly are the kids up to? Why are they doing this, like this? In what sense does it make sense to them, that would make sense to me?

In the Bay Area, tents sit on sidewalks, under nearly every highway overpass, and, until recently, in People’s Park, another famous site of Berkeley resistance, which was once a homeless encampment. The university has since blockaded the park with a fortress of shipping containers, stacked like Lincoln Logs. The university’s administration wants to build a dormitory on the site, and its early attempts to start construction were disrupted by a coalition of young students and old Berkeley radicals—a reminder that protest in America is always nostalgic and referential, shot through with the desire for a past radicalism, one with specifics that, like Savio’s speech, have been diluted over time.

But references change and can take on multiple meanings. Zach, a Palestinian American undergraduate who was participating in the Sproul Hall encampment, told me that the tents were meant to allude to conditions in Gaza, where more than a million people have been displaced. Zach grew up in California, and he told me that his mother had always been “really scared about advocacy for Palestine,” which she thought seemed dangerous. As a result, their household felt apolitical out of necessity. But Zach was drawn to Berkeley not only by its faculty but by its reputation as a place where dissent flourished. “I wanted to learn from the people who wrote the textbooks, but I also came because of its political advocacy and its history in the Free Speech Movement,” Zach said. After October 7th, Zach started taking part in actions organized by Students for Justice in Palestine.